Hydrogen

I wanted to be surprised. It’s what I’d requested. Whatever. In that respect, I’d brought it all on myself. People were dead. People I had known since our teenage years. I’d seen them before they’d cultivated their first blackhead and zit… and now they were dead. One of them, a woman I’d had sex with on a heady night, had been almost ripped in two.

“Surprise me.” The words I would never again say without being brought back to this time and this location. The vision of these people was scorched deep inside my hippocampus.

“Are you okay, Billy?”

“Huh?” I was in shock, I think. Maybe not shock. I wasn’t feeling cold, or nauseas, but the cogs in my brain were whirring, unable to engage gears. “Okay? Umm…”

“I think he’s in shock.” She said, her little box of tricks in hand. “No wounds visible.”

She came closer and spoke as though speaking to a person of age eighty plus. “I’m just going to sit you down. Okay?”

“Huh?” Her touch was light. I was happy for it.

“I’m going to look you over. Okay?” Still the high pitched, reassuring pacification.

“They exploded.” I heard the words leave me, but was conscious of no brain function that had created them.

“It’s okay. We’re here now to help y- erm… exploded? What was it… that exploded?”

“It was a surprise.” I saw the surprise in my head and I closed my eyes to it. Thankfully the vision was momentarily extirpated… only to reappear seconds later.

“A surprise? It’s okay. You’re okay. What happened exactly?”

“I’d asked… I’d asked… I’d asked… for balloons. They surprised me, you could say that. These things were huge. Bodge, I told him, I said, Bodge, you can’t… you have to empty the balloons. Helium is inert. This is hydrogen. So he walked to the end of the garden and got out his lighter. I had no time to stop him… so I ran.”

“Hydrogen…?” Her face was a visible representation of a question mark. How the fuck did they get hold of hydrogen?

I took a firm hold of her wrists. We locked eyes. I was intent she should understand me. “You have to listen,” I said, “They all hated me. They only came… they only did it cos I won the lottery. I’m glad. Do you hear me? I’m glad of it.”